The Three Minds
Here you can develop an understanding of the workings of the conscious, subconscious, and Creative Level of Mind and the key roles they play in the hypnosis/self-hypnosis process.
Where conventional thought is concerned, there are two minds--the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is that part of our mind that learns through the five senses; it judges, evaluates and analyzes what it perceives through the senses. Critical thinking occurs in this state of mind. The conscious mind is the reasoning, intellectual aspect of our mind. It is the part of the mind we have awareness of--the decision maker, the boss (at least seemingly). Essentially, the conscious mind uses the five senses to perceive the world around us and then evaluates and analyzes that world. While most of us believe the conscious mind to be the more powerful part of our mind, there is another mind, a very powerful mind, that lies just beneath the awareness of the conscious mind--the subconscious mind.
The subconscious is that part of the mind we are unaware of; yet, it is easily the most powerful part of our mind. For intricately interwoven with the subconscious is the third mind, the Creative Level of Mind. All three minds are intertwined and work in conjunction with each other. The Creative Level of Mind is where our intuition and imagination arise from. It is also the energetic source of power for our creations. The subconscious acts as a bridge or conduit through which information flows (in both directions) between the conscious mind and the Creative Level of Mind.
The subconscious is also the home of our emotions--which accounts for its dominance of the conscious mind. This is true because in most cases our emotions will easily overrule the rational part of us. When there is a conflict between the conscious and subconscious minds, the subconscious mind almost always wins out (more on that later). The subconscious never judges, analyzes, or rationalizes; it simply accepts all information presented to it. Children are mostly subconscious mind until the age of 9 or 10 when their conscious minds begin to fully develop. All the information taken in by children are stored and neatly organized within their subconscious minds where the information (and the correlative thoughts and feelings they have about the information) becomes the foundation for the belief systems they will carry with them as adults.
The subconscious breathes us; keeps our hearts pumping and circulates the blood throughout our body; is in charge of digestion and elimination; and carries out all the involuntary functions of our body. Our subconscious mind never requires sleep. It works for us 24/7/365.
One of the most important aspects of the subconscious is that it automatically directs the Creative Level of Mind to carry out all of our habituated behavioral patterns for us including all our physical patterns of behavior--the way we walk; the faces we make; our posture; even the way we are sitting in our chairs at this very moment reading this web page. It's all automated by our subconscious. Our subconscious directs the automated actions (just as we've taught the subconscious to do) which are then physically and energetically carried out by the Creative Level of Mind. We didn't have to give any thought to the way we happen to be sitting in our chairs at this very moment. The subconscious directed our body to assume the sitting position we are in based on the way we have programmed it to do so throughout the years. Even more importantly, our subconscious directs our habituated behavior in our relationships with other people and the world around us. Here's how that works.
Ever met someone for whom you have an immediate dislike? Most of us have had that sort of reaction to a person or an event that causes us some level of emotional upset for no readily apparent reason. We don't know the person at all; they haven't done anything to us, yet something about the person seems to cause us to experience some unpleasant feelings in our body and perhaps some equally unpleasant thoughts. So, why does this happen? Because it's an automatic reaction carried out by our subconscious to a stimulus (the person we've just encountered) that has activated our automatic programming. Something about the person (their energy, the way they look, or perhaps their body language) reminds us of another person who at some time in the past caused us some kind of emotional upset. Our subconscious recorded the encounter with the person who originally caused us the emotional upset and stored those memories for us in the depths of our mind and in the cellular structure of our body. And when we met this "new" person, something about them triggered our automated response.
The world we see around us, and the people in the world, are constantly triggering our automated behavior which is directed by our subconscious minds and carried out by the Creative Level of Mind. So we go around reacting to life rather than living life in a more creative and spontaneous way. The vast majority of us run around on automatic pilot the vast majority of the time doing the same things in the same way over and over again. Why? Because most of the thoughts we have today are the same thoughts we had yesterday. And these same reoccurring thoughts keep creating the same experiences for us. So, while our possibilities and potential are truly limitless, we recreate the same experiences again and again until we choose to think differently. Occasionally, we come to the realization that we're in a rut in some aspect of our life and would like to make a change. And just how do we go about making changes in our life? It begins by having a strong desire to make a change. If our desire isn't strong enough, we aren't likely to be able to overcome the old programming. Once our desire is strong enough, we must then go about the task of changing our mind about who we are or what we're choosing to create for ourselves. And this change must be made at the subconscious level of mind and then carried out at the Creative Level of Mind.
Click here to move to the Creative Level of Mind section.